Personality Disorders

Over the years’, God has sent a number of what I like to call the ‘peace & love’ crowd to deal with.

Usually, they initially present themselves as being incredibly tolerant, understanding and accepting of all mankind, except that they have ‘issues’ with anyone they deem to be less tolerant, understanding and accepting than themselves.

Which of course, is where the wheels come off the bus. Because everyone ‘tolerates and accepts’ what they like, and what speaks to them, and what they agree with, but very few people tolerate, accept or like what they disagree with, or dislike.

If you happen to press one of the peace & love crowd’s ‘hot buttons’ – OOOWA! Do you find out about it fast.

Suddenly, all the smiles and hugs disappear, and you normally find yourself on the end of some incredibly vitriolic ‘punishing’ behavior. They bad mouth you; they ignore you; they diss you and your ‘backwards’ ideas and they often resort to the sort of personal attacks that leave your gaping at the ferocity and meanness being displayed.

All in the name of ‘peace & love’, of course, although sometimes it comes packaged with different labels, like: ‘democracy’, or ‘unity’, or ‘unconditional acceptance’, or ‘one faith’ or some such politically-correct claptrap.

Recently, I had to deal with another member of the ‘peace & love’ crowd who was effectively trying to start their own religion (although they wouldn’t admit that in a million years…) Just orthodox Judaism was so ‘intolerant’; and ‘inflexible’; and ‘rigid’; and ‘ritualistic’, and mankind would be much better following this person’s own free-flowing ideas of unity and love.

I dared to disagree – and what do you know?

The peace and acceptance disappeared instantaneously, and I had a cold war on my hands. I could just hear the argument being made between the lines of the incredibly cold, formal email I received: People LIKE YOU are exactly the problem!! If people LIKE YOU would just disappear from the scene, life would be so much better!! People LIKE YOU are so backwards, and intolerant and unaccepting!! You make me sick!!

Ah, peace & love.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my many discussions with the peace & love politically-correct crowd:

They only tolerate people who agree with them.

They are probably the most genuinely intolerant people you’ll ever meet in your life (but that will only be obvious when you actually dare to cross them).

They are a million miles away from practicing what they preach, because their ‘peace & love’ attitude only extends to people who think the same way they do, and everyone else is devalued and discounted as ‘the enemy’ and an obstacle to ‘peace & love’.

Any honest discussion you try to have with them about how their ideas of ‘peace & love’ would actually work in practice (given that we AREN’T all the same, and we DON’T all believe or want the same things) will get closed down so fast, it’ll make your head spin.

Discussions about what’s objectively ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ make them very uncomfortable. EVERYTHING is OK by them (except when it isn’t…)

There’s probably more to say, but that will do for now.

Let’s end with this small clarification about the nature of judgment:

It’s human nature to judge, and we all do it. God gave us the faculty to discern between good and evil, right and wrong, and He wants us to make good use of it. When we use our ability to judge to clarify when an action, belief or behavior is wrong, that’s a very good thing.

When we misuse our ability to judge by a) falsely claiming that making judgments is always bad and / or b) judging people as opposed to their actions, then that’s a very bad thing.

Our sages tell us repeatedly that only God can judge the entirety of a person. But our part, our duty, even, is to continually judge behaviours, ideas and actions¸ both our own and others, to see if they’re objectively good or not. Are they building the world, or the opposite? Are they putting more kindness and consideration in the world, or more cruelty and selfish interest?

The peace & love crowd hate this idea, I know, but we aren’t going to get anywhere near to the vision of unity and human redemption without it.

Yesterday, I was listening to Rav Eliyahu Meirav’s interview with the Israeli media, and I felt very sad. For those who don’t already know, Rav Meirav’s stepson, Yosef Cohen, Hyd, was one of the two Nahal Chareidi soldiers gunned down at Givat Assaf, close to Bet El, last Thursday.

Rav Meirav was raised on the totally secular Shomer Hair Kibbutz of Bet Alfa, and was a fighter pilot in the IDF airforce. He made teshuva after the Yom Kippur war – along with so many others of that generation, who’d seen with their own eyes just how limited the army really was.

Rav Meirav met Rav Berland – and became one of his closest students.

If you read the secular press descriptions of Rav Meirav, you’ll notice that they kept stressing that he was part of the Breslov ‘sect’. That’s their way of using subtle language to keep dissing religious people anyway they can, and to sow division and hatred.

After Rav Meirav’s son was killed al Kiddush Hashem, all those ucky news sites with their agendas to sow hatred and strife between the Jewish people started running false stories about how Yosef had been ‘thrown out of his home’ for joining the army, and how his parents had ‘sat shiva’ for him even before he died.

Because hey, why miss any opportunity to put the boot in to the chareidi community, and especially the Breslov Chassidic ‘sect’?!

This led to the absolutely sickening spectacle of Rav Meirav and his wife having to give interviews to the press – before they’d even buried their son – refuting the lies that had been spread about their family.

I listened to Rav Meirav speak – about Yosef’s last words, about his own background and teshuva, and most of all about the need for us to stop all the awful hatred, and to come together as one people, respecting each other’s differences – and it really made me pause for thought.

The haters out there are on all sides of the equation.

They work for Ha’aretz, they live in Tel Aviv, they hate any hint of yiddishkeit, and they use the media to paint awful pictures of frum Jews as ‘blood-sucking, medieval parasites’ at any opportunity. But that’s not the only place you’ll find them.

You’ll also find plenty of apparently ‘frum’ haters out there too.

‘Frum’ haters pour scorn on the Jews who don’t live in Israel and wait for big comets to smash into America and kill everyone. They hate people who want to convert to yiddishkeit, they hate people who don’t conform, they hate people who aren’t ‘frum’, or who aren’t ‘frum’ enough, or who are too ‘frum’, or not the right sort of ‘frum’.

‘Frum’ haters also hate people who don’t vaccinate….and they hate people who do vaccinate. They hate people who voted for Trump, they hate people who don’t think exactly like them, and see the world exactly the way they do.

Every bit of the Jewish world is riddled with this disease of hating other Jews – including our bit.

And there is no segment of society that is doing better at loving our fellow Jews than any other.

We all have the problem and we all need to work on it.

One of the things that drew me to Breslov, and drew me to Rabbenu, is that in Rabbenu’s tent, everyone is welcome. When you go to Uman, you stop seeing people as ‘frum’ and ‘not frum’, or as part of your group or not part of your group.

You just see them as individuals, as Jews.

And some of those Jews are really nice, and really deep and really holy – however they may look externally. And some of those Jews are really not so easy to get on with, and have a number of obvious bad middot and issues – however they may look externally.

The yetzer works overtime to convince us that ‘our bit’ of the Jewish world is fine, the best, the shining example for the rest of Jewish society, while all the other bits are the ones with the problem.

But it’s not true! Not at all!

The problem comes down to this:

There are Jewish people who look for reasons to hate other Jews, and there are Jewish people who look for reasons to try to love them.

And both groups are scattered and embedded across all the different segments of Jewish society.

Sadly, our world being the morally-degenerate mess it currently is, it seems the people who hate the most are also the ones with the biggest mouths, and the biggest audiences, and the biggest following on Youtube.

The haters pop-up all over the place, to have a go at others, and to put the boot in, and to harp on about how great they are, and how great their group is – always at the expense of others.

I’ve had to learn the hard way, that this is not at all what God wants from us.

I’ve also had ‘hating’ tendencies that I’ve had to really work on, and to try to uproot, over the last few years. That process of teshuva taught me that the haters ‘hate’ because they actually don’t like themselves very much at all. And that they’re secretly jealous of other people, and it’s the envy that causes them to diss the other Jew, the other group, so loudly, so poisonously, so arrogantly.

Whatever the hater is criticizing so much in others, that ‘thing’ is somehow embedded in their own souls.

So, I listened to Rav Meirav talk, and I wondered ‘how can I do more, to get from hate to love’? How can I do more, to make my house a ‘no-tolerance for sinat chinam’ zone?

I’m going to pray on it, and I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Because one thing is for sure:

Nothing is slowing up Moshiach more, or causing us more problems and heartache in our own lives, than hating other Jews.

A few years’ ago, me and my husband got burned by three ‘big’ rabbis in a row.

Each one was a ‘name’, each one was connected to Breslov, and each one left an indelible imprint on our lives. One of them started up a sadna that was based on the opposite of Torah and Breslov principles – particularly the principle of Azamra, or seeing the good especially in yourself – which my husband attended a few short months after his dad unexpectedly died.

My husband was in a particularly vulnerable place at that stage, and his dad’s passing had left him with a lot of unresolved issues. This sadna was billed as ‘the answer’ to all of life’s questions, and this big, Breslov rabbi was behind so it seemed like a great idea.

When my husband got this big Breslov rabbi as his personal mentor, we thought ‘wow, what an honor!’ Six weeks’ in, my husband really, really wanted to switch mentors, and I wouldn’t let him. I thought it was just his ego, and that this ‘big Breslov rabbi’ was heaven-sent to help us both grow and progress.

Man, was I wrong. That guy completely messed my husband up, severely messed up my shalom bayit (for years!) by telling my husband that he ‘lacked manliness’ and left us in a place where my husband was profoundly disliking himself and everyone else, too.

That set the stage for false rabbi #2 to step in.

As a result of false rabbi #1, we started to think that so many of our relationships were unhealthy and toxic. We asked rabbi #2 what to do about all these poisonous, unhealthy, distressing relationships – and he told us to cut off contact and ‘challenge’ everyone on their flaws.

(Again, the polar opposite of the ‘Azamra’ approach).

Within a few short months, we were almost completely friendless and so very, very lonely. Still, I had no idea that all these rabbis weren’t the real deal, didn’t have ruach hakodesh and were actually no more clued up about my life and what I should be doing in it than I was myself.

Around this same time, false rabbi #3 started giving a whole bunch of classes about how people with emuna shouldn’t work for a living (without telling his class that his wife was slaving away at a full-time job in order to support his family….)

At that point, my husband was so miserable, and so desperate for things to feel better, he decided he needed to show God how much emuna he had by quitting the job that he’d also come to hate. He told this ‘rabbi’ his plan – and instead of talking him out of it, the guy egged him on!

So he quit.

And six months later, we had to sell our house to pay the bills, which segued into a whole, incredibly difficult few years that Baruch Hashem we finally started to come out of a couple of years’ back.

At the time all this was happening, we had no clue that all three of these ‘rabbis’ weren’t so good for us.

They all knew more Torah than us, they all had impeccable credentials, they all looked the part and talked the talk.

But following their advice left our life in tatters, and came pretty close to permanently sinking my faith in humanity.

Within two short weeks of asking Hashem to show us who the real Tzaddikim in the world really were, all these ‘false rabbis’ got unmasked – at least in our eyes – one after another. Which was a good thing, because we finally had clarity, but also a ‘bad’ thing, inasmuch as my desire to ‘out’ them and to tell everyone else about them was so overwhelming, I almost set up a website devoted to doing just that.

What stopped me was a visit to Rav Arush.

Without us saying the names or any identifying details of the rabbis who had burned us so badly, we could see that Rav Arush knew exactly what we were talking about. He told my husband he wasn’t crazy for thinking what he was thinking – three times – and then told my husband – again three times – to just have patience.

Things would sort themselves out, eventually.

Again, this was clearly advice from a true tzaddik, but at the time it took so much effort to calm down and follow it. I was so full of vengeance! I was so angry! I was so disgusted! Today, I thank God a hundred times a day for Rav Arush and his advice, and that Hashem helped us to actually follow it.

Because after doing a good couple of years’ hitbodedut on the whole subject of ‘false rabbis’ I’ve realized that while it would be SOOO easy to blame all my problems and my difficulties on them, in reality, God was behind everything that happened to us, and we certainly deserved everything we went through.

It’s human nature to want the short-cut, to want the easy life.

The idea that I can find a ‘rabbi’ who will tell me what to do, and how to think, and how to act and decide all the difficult details of my life – and it’ll then all turn out perfect all the time – is overwhelmingly appealing to most people, especially in our generation, when we’re so beset by inner turmoil and huge doubts, anxieties and fears.

But Hashem only created us in order for us to get to know Him, and to exercise our free choice. So when we try to give our free choice away to another person – even if that person is genuinely a tzaddik and amazing in all respects – that’s only going to lead to trouble, one way or another.

Whatever ‘reed’ we rely on, that is not Hashem, is destined to splinter in our hands.

When it came to our three false rabbis, each one was reflecting our own prejudices and problems, in some way. That’s why we liked them so much. One of them was basically telling us that our lives were entirely in our hands, and that all it took to fix everything was ‘clarity and willpower’. God was effectively out the picture.

Another one was basically telling us that the way to deal with whatever and whoever we didn’t like was simply to cut them out of the picture and pretend they didn’t exist – even though God had sent them into our lives for an express purpose. We had a lot of teshuva we needed to make and that’s why we had all these difficult people mirroring our own difficulties back at us in such a disturbing way.

Again, cutting these ‘messengers’ out of the picture the way we did was effectively cutting God out the picture.

Another one was playing to our false sense of piety, and reflecting back at us our (false…) inner conviction that a) we were on a high enough spiritual level to be sustained economically with no effort other than prayer and b) God somehow ‘owed’ us an easy, good life for doing all this extra, super-duper pious stuff. Again, we liked this guy initially because he was telling us what we wanted to hear.

And so it is with all these false rabbis.

They tell us what we want to hear, they play to our prejudices, they promise us shortcuts in our spiritual work, if only we follow them and throw our ability to choose for ourselves away.

And then when it all goes wrong, they go AWOL and / or tell us it was all our fault, anyway.

And on some level, they’re actually right, because we are all responsible for our own actions and our own decisions.

You went ahead and married the guy? Stop blaming the matchmaking for forcing you into it.

You went ahead and quit your job? Stop blaming your friend for talking you into it.

You went ahead and made a really terrible business investment? Stop blaming the person who made the introduction.

This is the lesson I had to learn – the hard way – for myself. We chose to start blaming other people for our problems. We chose to listen to people who told us to cut ourselves from everyone else. We chose to try to live on prayer alone.

Ultimately, the buck stops with us.

There is no-one else to blame, and no-one else to point the finger at.

Understanding that is key to moving past the hurt and betrayal, and to getting to the next stage of the process called: how to trust again.

Fresh off the back of yet another awful horrible story of potential marriage break-up, God forbid, this is a plea from the heart to all married readers to

PLEASE PUT YOUR SPOUSE FIRST!!!

I’ve written about this before, but it’s not being talked about enough in the frum Jewish world, that probably the biggest reason that couples break up today is because of a very unhealthy relationship with the parents and parents in law.

And I’m including both sets of ‘parents’ and ‘parents in law’ here, because there is no such thing as only one half of the couple coming from a dysfunctional background, however it may look externally.

When people grow up in emotionally healthy, accepting, God-fearing, functional families, they simply can’t jive with a spouse who grew up in a dysfunctional family that is not all of these things (i.e. nearly everyone in 2017).

I know this flies in the face of conventional marriage guidance and Western psychological thought. But the Zohar teaches us very clearly that husband and wife are two parts of the same soul. In some way that means that both people coming into the marriage experienced the same sorts of traumas, lacks, problems and issues – albeit it’s often dressed up in such different clothing, that usually that’s not at all obvious.

Again, if one set of parents are any admixture of emotionally unhealthy / controlling / neglectful / dismissive of their children’s true feelings / grasping / selfish / rigid / intolerant of difference / snobby / angry / jealous of their children’s love, attention and loyalty going towards a spouse (I’m missing a bunch of things out here, but you get the picture…) then IT’S IMPOSSIBLE for the other set of parents to be totally emotionally healthy.

Everyone has their issues, everyone their problems.

Some are more obvious, some are more hidden, and God puts couples together dafka to bring those ‘hidden’ issues up to the surface, so they can finally be worked on and fixed.

Dear reader, I have heard so many horror stories of parents who are so caught up in what they want, and what they prefer, and what’s good for them that they are wreaking havoc upon their children’s marriages, shalom bayit, emotional health and general well-being. I know this stuff is so hard to spot (also because it’s so common that we think it’s ‘normal’ behavior) – so here’s some examples of what emotionally unhealthy parents do, so you can see what I’m on about:

Emotionally-unhealthy parents:

Expect their kid to put them and their needs first, ahead of what’s good for their spouse.

This takes many forms, including: inviting themselves to stay for ages; expecting the kid to attend any events / holidays they deem necessary; making decisions on behalf of their kids without checking it’s what the kid (AND THEIR SPOUSE!!) really wants or can manage (‘we’ll all come to you for Seder again this year!’) etc

Only corresponding with their child, while ignoring the spouse (and their wishes) completely.

Instead of encouraging the kid to make a joint decision with their spouse, emotionally unhealthy parents completely sideline the spouse, and speak only to the kid. The spouse doesn’t really ‘exist’ – but here’s the thing, neither does the kid. It’s just harder to hide that reality from a grown-up who didn’t get used to this situation from childhood (at least, from that set of parents).

Criticise, pick holes in and generally slag off the kid’s spouse to the kid.

Whatever problems are going in the marriage, it’s very rarely ever only one person’s fault.

Emotionally unhealthy parents excel in seeing the ‘bad’ in the spouse, while excusing their own kids’ contribution to the situation.

This is because they see their kid as an extension of themselves, so when the kid starts acting in their marriages according to the bad middot and mentally ill behaviors they learnt at home, the parents find it very hard to accept this behavior is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’.

If they accepted that it was ‘wrong’, they’d be acknowledging that much of their own behavior is crazy and ‘wrong’ – and emotionally unhealthy people struggle to do that tremendously.

So it’s much easier to just blame the other person and ‘the other side’ for all the issues, and avoid looking at what’s really going on in our backyards, with our own dysfunctional and destructive family dynamics.

Drop hints, obviously and otherwise, that if the marriage ends that’s no big loss.

This one is SO upsetting to me when there are kids involved, because the people who do this are operating from the mistaken assumption that you can somehow surgically remove a parent out of the equation and it won’t have any impact on the kids.

Sometimes, when you’re dealing with chronic abuse or a level of madness that is almost impossible to fix, it could be there is no choice except to get divorced. I understand that. But divorce even in those circumstances is still the lesser of two evils, and not a ‘good’ thing.

Whatever the parents don’t fix, it just gets passed down the line to the kids. If you don’t work together with your spouse to fix their bad traits (and also your own…) those bad traits get passed on to the next generation, who then find themselves with a huge job on their hands.

When you divorce, your ability to fix your spouse – and the parts of your spouse that are PART OF YOUR CHILDREN – diminishes considerably.

You don’t get the same siyatta dishmaya, you don’t have the same motivation to do six hour sessions, to pour your heart out to God to help you, to help your spouse, to fix the problems in your family.

Getting divorced is SO much easier than dealing with disappointment, frustration and thwarted dreams day in and day out. At least, that’s how it looks, if you pretend that your spouse is not an integral part of your kids, and the other half of your own neshama…

The buck stops with us! Don’t give up on your marriages! Don’t give up on your spouses!

I know it’s so, so hard, I really do.

But getting divorced is NOT an easy option (even when there are extreme circumstances and your God fearing Rabbi is counselling you that this is truly the best option for you and your family.)

For so many people, it’s the apparent shortcut out of all the drama and hassle that turns into the longest and most painful road of your life.

Just ask the divorcee I hear screaming most nights a week that she’s going crazy, and can’t do it all by herself anymore!!! Ask the lost, miserable kids I see wandering around my neighborhood, smoking cigarettes at age 11 and getting into all sorts of trouble. Ask the dad who misses his kids so badly, and who dies a bit more inside every time he thinks of his kids growing up in some other man’s house.

Fight for your marriages, fight for your spouses! Don’t leave your kids to rectify all those massive bad middot they inherited by themselves!

Pray your hearts out!

Be aware that most of us come from highly dysfunctional families, and that if you’re seeing that by your spouse’s family, it’s 100% for sure also lurking in your own background too, just waiting for you to wake up and acknowledge it, and to fix the problem in your own family tree.

And the first way to start that process is this:

PUT YOUR SPOUSE FIRST.

May God bless us all with the emuna, strength, patience, prayer, perseverance and love we need to hold our families together in these extremely troubling times.

As you know if you’ve been with me for a while, a few weeks’ back I deleted all of my Facebook accounts, because I couldn’t tolerate the lashon hara, hatred, arrogance, insanity and general atmosphere of Gehinnom that is Facebook.

Thank God, I was barely on it anyway, so it’s not like I had a million mentally-ill ‘friends’ to worry about insulting or losing, but it was still a small test, as the yetzer has everyone convinced that they really NEED Facebook, in order to do anything, or get anywhere in life.

One thing I’ve noticed about the increasingly mentally-ill nature of ‘debates’ and comments on Facebook in particular is how many of the really crazy people online are trying to close down any real discussion of real topics in the following bullying and abusive ways:

Way 1: the publicly-posted expletive filled rant:

I’ve seen this response so many times (if you can really call something so Neanderthal a ‘response…) from ‘religious’ atheists, gay rights activists, anti-Trump ‘intellectuals’ and of course, the self-appointed moral guardians of the Jewish world who are anti Rav Berland.

The slightly more civilized version of this bullying rant (again, from the same bunch of people just described) is:

– written with so much hatred and contempt it literally makes you shudder.

Recently, I’ve been pondering how it is that the people who seem to believe that they are so open-minded, so tolerant, so intellectually-refined, so apparently wedded to the principles of truth and justice etc etc etc are invariably the ones acting liking mini mentally-ill dictators online.

Dare to have a different opinion to them, dare to question them, or their ideas, dare to challenge them to actually consider that they might be wrongabout what they believe and all you get back is self-justifying vitriol and more personal abuse. What you definitely don’t get, in any way, shape or form, is any cogent, logical counter-arguments, or any interest in discussing and debating the issue in question, in the time-honored Jewish way to discover where the point of truth really lies.

Instead, you get threats, hatred, insults, lashon hara, verbal abuse, personal attacks, and anything else they can think of to try and close the discussion down (and permanently vilify…) the person challenging their ideas ASAP.

Why this insane over-reaction?

Why are they so ‘fragile’ and defensive that they have to try and annihilate and ‘punish’ anyone that disagrees with their view or position in a way that the Third Reich would be proud of?

Personally, I welcome honest debate. Personally, whenever I’m challenged (which can sometimes happen a lot) I take that discomfort that I sometimes feel, and the shame and embarrassment it sometimes engenders, into hitbodedut, and I go and ask God to show me the truth.

What I’ve discovered is that the truth is very rarely a 0-100% split. Usually, the person challenging me is right about something, at the very least 1% right about something, that I haven’t considered or acknowledged before, and that’s why God has put them in my face to make me uncomfortable.

Remember the three rules of emuna:

God is doing everything, and is behind every single thing that happens to us.

Everything that happens is somehow for our good.

There’s a message hidden in every single thing that occurs to us, and also within us, about what we ourselves need to work on and fix.

All the self-righteous Facebook ‘haters’ clearly aren’t operating according to the three rules of emuna, or anything close to it. Now, you wouldn’t really expect that from a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, a gay-rights activist, or an anti-Trump person.

But all those people, all those apparently ‘frum’ people who are ‘anti’ Rav Berland, and who clearly believe themselves to be the guardians of morality, and the keepers of Jewish truth in the world, what’s their excuse for cutting God so completely out of the picture, and acting like a bunch of mentally-ill heretical haters?

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About Me

Rivka Levy is a Breslov writer who is trying not to go bonkers while she waits for Moshiach to show up. She's the author of The Secret Diary of a Jewish Housewife series, plus a bunch of other books like Talk To God and Fix Your Health, 49 Days, and Unlocking the Secret of the Erev Rav.